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Puma City NYC is a month long World Cup celebration focused around Football by day and parties by night, the event is being held down at the Pier 17, South Street Seaport in New York City. The Puma City event runs from the 11th June until 11th July with a number of sponsors such as Time Out NY running events. The first official event is run by TimeOut Tony’s Party with tickets only $25 for the 3 hour DJ event. The most interesting point I noticed is that there is actually very little information about the event available, and typically based on past events it will only start to be known until after the event ends or in the photos friends post on Facebook the day after.

Media doesn’t care for PR anymore

Once again a significant amount of money has been spent setting up the Puma City event in New York City, but it seems that the marketing behind the event is asleep at the wheel and relying on slightly useful PR releases to get Newspapers and Media to do the hard work for them. Puma is a strong brand and should be taking more proactive measures to both promote itself as a brand and don’t trust that traditional media will actually care unless you are buying advertising or advertorial.

Early images of the setup of Puma City New York

Picture(1) Workers completing the net around the miniature soccer pitch where competitions are likely to be held over the month long Puma City NY event.

Picture(2) Staff completing the internal goals on the miniature soccer pitch where competitions are likely to be held over the month long Puma City NY event. They are all wearing Puma gear (socks,shoes)

Picture(3) One of several Puma Shipping container stores at South Street Seaport, New York.

Picture(4) One of several Puma Shipping container stores at South Street Seaport, New York.

Picture(5) Its not clear if this is part of the Puma City event or just guerrilla marketing by a local sports store, but the timing and location seem to convenient…

Puma City Background

The background behind the Puma City Store is that it is built around a container ship modular system by LOT-EK where 24 containers are able to be joined to create a 3 storey store with retail areas, bar/lounge and 2 viewing decks. The portable Puma Store makes use of discarded shipping containers as building blocks for its prefabricated buildings.

Originally Puma City was built for the Volvo Ocean Race in 2008, but it has be redesigned for Puma City New York by its original architects LOT-EK, one of the original architects of prefab modular units.It is interesting that on the architect LOT-EK‘s own website in the events section, they don’t feature any news about the Puma City NY event. This is a shame as they designed the store structures, they should be getting more exposure for their prefab structures.

The builders who helped LOT-EK with the Puma City NY project are SG Blocks. SB Blocks fits in with LOT-EK as their focus is around retrofitting the shipping containers that match to LOT-EK’s design specs for the project and enabling Puma to have the coolest retail store in the world. The specifications on the shipping containers are impressive as they fire, hurricane and earthquake-resistant containers and make for perfect for construction materials anywhere in the world.

Puma Facebook Failure

The interesting point is that the official Facebook page for PumaCity doesn’t actually have any forthcoming events. There has been no activity on their Facebook page since 20th May 2009, but again there are still 4,229 fans who could be engaged about the Puma City NY event. This appears to be bit of a failure by a company once again to use existing assets to promote more than one event, as Facebook pages are not designed for set and forget unlike many brands seem to believe.

Even the official Puma page with 1,638,489 fans makes no mention of the upcoming Puma City NY event, which is a massive audience that is engaged with your brand but may miss out. This is a once again a lost opportunity as Puma or its agency is paying thousands of dollars in sending out PR releases but not taking full advantage of its massive existing audience. Is it the case that Puma doesn’t want its existing audience to know about the event

If Puma was interested in getting this campaign viral, they should be using some of their social media assets. When I visited the location a few days ago they had hundreds of tourists taking photos but there was no real information as to what the event was about.

Puma needs Facebook Ads

It’s not too late to start promotions via Facebook Ads targeting people. I would run several campaigns as you want to drive interest in PumaCity as an event to visit while in NY. As Puma is a global brand another slightly larger campaign for those who might not visit PumaCity NY but might be interested in being associated with Puma because of this event. The other part of the Puma Facebook campaign would be to run sponsored events to ensure that each nights party event is a sell out and PumaCity sponsors such as TimeOut NY get plenty of exposure.

Suggested Puma Facebook Campaign

How I would suggest their could run the PumaCity Facebook Campaign. There is the obvious split between engaging with those who like your brand Puma but also a great opportunity to reach out to those who like Adidas/Reebok/Nike but love Football. The campaign would be split with a focus and larger budget for those who live in New York City (estimated audience 6,341,240). These may visit New York sometime in the next month and will hopefully supported by a secondary for those who live in New York state (estimated audience 7,408,920) and may not travel to New York, Seaport much unless there is something worthwhile.

The next would be those who like or have an interest in soccer, football or world cup 2010, which is a estimated audience of around 5,257.260 people just in the USA.

Avoid the potential failure

The potential for this event is amazing but it seems that its almost like an invite only event that is at risk of being a white elephant unless some money is spent on promoting it better via Facebook, Twitter and even Google Google AdWords. This is a lost opportunity to start to spread interest about the event before its actually started, this event seems slightly similar to how the Corona Beach Party failed to generate much buzz for the brand or the event. The only real difference is that this event runs for 1 month and hasn’t yet started so it might not yet fail, so check out Puma City NY events before they get popular….

In what could have been a successful ongoing event to add to the excitement for tourist visiting Times Square, New York was actually just a single 24-hour PR event for Corona. The event was a 24-hour beach party but it should have been part of a longer event as summer is more than just 24 hours and beach holidays should be relaxing not fly in fly out as Corona has tried to market them.

From an online perspective it was a bit of a dismal failure with a larger drop in online interest in the brand after the event, you can see even when adding in News headlines, none of the PR activities around the 24 beach party were picked up by media. For the amount of money that was spent renting the prime real estate in one of the most expensive locations in the world, more thought should have been put into PR as well as online marketing. According to AdAge the costs to advertise in Times Square can range around $350,000/month for a single outdoor billboard and that was 5 years ago, but according to Wikipedia the signs can be rented from as little as $10,000 per hour if available.

A 2006 NYTimes article on Times Square’s viral benefits for advertisers being that visitors/tourists photograph, blog and watch the YouTube clips but even using the audience figures this campaign still amounts to a failure. The rental cost would have been around $25000-50,000 for the day at 2006 prices and since it wasn’t a public holiday Corona might have even got a discount for their event, but I’m not sure they got a decent ROI for a haphazard product launch.

Beer, Win & Spirit companies know how to do a headline grabbing launch party, but this event seemed to lack all the PR hype a unique event like this should have attracted. One of the Youtube clips I found while fairly well produced still didn’t really set the charts on fire with less than 400 views, that shows that the event didn’t attract as much attention and interest as it could have.

There also doesn’t appear to be anything like an official Youtube brand channel, an official twitter feed as Corona Summerbration did last year, it still actually has a few hundred people who are following the account and it would have been smart to update these loyal followers that the new campaign for 2010 is Beach Party. You have a pre-engaged audience ready and willing to accept advertising/brand promotional messages for Corona summer campaigns. It’s not like you are now selling Corona T shirts or are cross promoting other beer brands, it’s the same product and its the same seasonal campaign, which makes it a perfect match that was missed.

It seems that the old Summerbration campaign page is still up and live, which is wasteful for the client Corona who is paying the costs to host the site and should be redirected to the new Beach Getaway campaign site. The redirect will provide the new site with increased traffic, improved search results in search engines such as Google and allows the consumers to easily find this years promotion and not get confused with Summerbration 2009.

The Facebook pages also seem to be lacking for Corona as a brand but I did find an unofficial fanpage for Corona Extra. But the Corona Extra Facebook page has 22,292 fans who could have been engaged to drive some hype prior to the event, and even used to better distribute the summary videos shown above to friends on Facebook. The below images show that even though the Facebook page is not an official page it still has a reasonably high level of fan interaction for the wall posts which the Corona Beach Party @ Times Square could have benefited from.

This shows the brands complete disconnect with online marketing and failure to understand the benefits of engaging social media which was a shame as I know many people in New York would have attended if they knew the event was on. It wasn’t a secret show for a big act, it was a PR event for a new summer promotion that flopped in one of the biggest advertising market places in the world, maybe they should just stick to making beer?

Looking at Google Insights for Search screenshot below for a period of the last 30 days for US Google search traffic around the keyword “Corona” showed that even though the Beach Party event was held in New York City, it was only the 4th most interested metro location for search traffic around “Corona”. The metro locations that showed more interest in Corona was: Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth and Washington with San Francisco matching New York for web traffic.

Typically when a large event happens and is promoted effectively it influences consumer web search traffic as they are looking to find out more about the event, where it was held and what it was offering/promoting. There was a very weak link between offline activities at Times Square, via PR channels and a complete miss on the online activities.

Looking at the website there is also a very large potential advertising space that Corona could have used to promote its Times Square Beach Party to its actual customers, there is a small link that enables you to visit their official Corona Facebook fanpage but I’m unable to access it, as it seems that page is no longer active and just redirects back to Facebook.com. This is a another failure to get social media right for this beach getaway campaign and it would have made more sense to have a campaign specific Corona Facebook page for all their summer events which can be re-used each year and would continue to grow members and audience they can market…

Corona’s marketing agency could have easily allocated a bigger budget around AdWords that would target at least New York residents, who heard about the event but missed it and wanted to find out more what it was about. There was some ads showing for Corona related search terms but they could have been tailored to NY with a messages such as hints about the Beach event they missed but it’s not too late to win…

Why not buy more AdWords traffic?During the time leading up to the 24 hour event, it would have made sense to buy AdWords around Times Square related searches and depending on the budget it would have made sense to continue this until the campaign gathered some more momentum at least in the New York market as shown in the metro interests was quite low for New York. Since the event was focused around Times Square, it makes sense to run a geographic campaign that should capture some of that traffic.

When I heard about the event, I Googled it to see what I could find out about the Corona Beach Party event, the screenshot below shows that besides the 2 video results posted 5 days ago, and a press release showing at #5 the results seemed to be more focusing around Corona’s dual signs that are showing on 1600 Broadway on 48th Street and not the event. This shows both a lack of freshness in the Google results around Corona but also how it is likely that even if the PR releases had worked, there was no campaign site or official page detailing more about the event and advising its just a 24 hour one-off event.

It seems that while some of the digital PR releases using keyword friendly links “win a beach getaway” worked for the exact phrase, the failure of the PR campaign to get picked up by multiple media publications meant that the site will likely struggle to the much higher traffic and suitable term “beach getaway” as shown below in the second screenshot. Again there is a missed market that could have been reached by expanding the campaign to use a larger AdWords budget. It’s interesting to see that Coke did not want to miss the PR opportunity and was seen in several searches buying AdWords traffic around related search phrases, all promoting its own Summer rewards program.

The welcome pages that require you to enter your state and verify your age is a large roadblock for any campaign, but business needs to obey local laws and campaigns such as the FTC’s national campaign to prevent underage drinking.

What’s in a name? Potentially everything. If it includes any of these deadly sins, then your saviour could come simply by changing it.

1)Thou shalt not have a name that is a direct synonym of a competitor.

a.A name which is very similar to a competitor will become the death of any unique selling point your business has to offer. This is because any attempt to distinguish your company will be overshadowed by their already established strengths and weaknesses. Let us say CallTel; an established fictional telephone provider; has a new competitor entering the market that decides to call their company RingTel and subsequently adopts a similar logo. CallTel begins to have some serious internal issues and goes into receivership. How will this affect Ringtel? For one, customers may think that they may be the same company. Negative light on CallTel will be reflected on Ringtel as people will relate the issues with one to the issues of another. Be careful that when choosing a name, you are not influenced by others.

2)Thou shalt not have a name that coveys a veiled meaning.

a.Veiled meanings can convey either a positive, negative or neutral message. Watch that your name does not express something you may wish not to convey. For example, Fooked New Car Dealer (use your imagination!) and Payne Dental Centre (ouch!) will not paint the picture you wish to convey. Get others who are in a different industry to critique your name. I am sure you know of some people who have accidently had this happen to them. Some true examples that come to mind are Jenny Taylor (Genitalia), Larry King (Larrikin) or Teresa Green (Trees are Green).

3)Thou shalt not have a name that signifies singularity.

a.If you plan for growth beyond one person; which is what many strive for; do not put a person’s name on it. Especially your own. That is one of the worst things you can do, unless you want to signify small or a family business, by all means go ahead. It also means your business will act more like a job than a business. But most of you will want to grow, so you need to take into account your long term strategy. Even if you are only one person, it’s better to be perceived as having an army behind an organisation. Also if you run into misfortune along the line, you save your family name from becoming tarnished.

4)Thou shalt not have a name which needs to be asked twice.

a.Simplicity. Keep the name to a maximum of two syllables if possible. A simple clever name is, simply remembered. Be clever, but not overly smart that it takes a course to figure out the meaning. Be creative, but not to the point of obscured ridiculousness. You want people to remember not to be confused. Less is more.

5)Thou shalt not have a name that is totally unrelated to your business

a.A name symbolizes your business. It evokes an image, emotion or meaning. These preconceptions are formed from how your customer sees that name. If you call yourself Goofy’s Civil Lawfirm or Funny Funeral directors your customer may be riled that you are not taking your business seriously. Your business name should evoke an image, emotion, or meaning that reflects your business.

Some examples of these include:

Tyrepower (powerful, masculine, strong and specialises in Tyres)

Freedom Furniture (Relaxation, liberated, comfort)

Coca Cola ( Derived from Cocoa leaves and Kola Nuts. The K was changed to C because it flowed better).

Your name should be fresh and interesting, free from obscurity and above all, memorable. A timely biblical fable is when Jesus simply said ‘follow me’ and devoted crowds followed. I’m not suggesting you’re Jesus, but your name needs to do the same. So remember, keep the name simple, your message powerful and it will become the starting point for your business to also develop a devoted crowd of followers. When you do this, you will capture and captivate your customers and reflect what you’re all about…in just a few powerful words.

Author Bio: Jethro Batts is a management focused entrepreneur who is working on a number of startup and consulting projects

Virgin is known for smart and effective marketing campaigns so this did not appear to be too much of a stretch to be true. The email promised a free upgrade to “gold” membership for one year FREE!

Checking all the details, the membership number was correct as was my details and the email address it was sent too. I have been travelling a bit more lately so it appeared possible that it might be real.

While the email seemed almost too good to be true, clicking on the link too me too the correct website pages and everything seemed legit. It wasn’t until I watch a tweet from BenGrubb which I later discovered was correct. His quick post on the issue outlined that VirginBlue had blamed an IT error for the gold upgrade.

Watching some of the initial reactions from Twitter before and after they sent the apology email did not seem to quell the dissatisfaction felt by the Velocity member’s who received the email. Some of the reactions were understanding but many brought up issues of anger and dissatisfaction with Virgin’s response to the issue. Some of the later tweets discussed the issue of members being spammed as they have previously un-subscribed from Velocity email marketing lists.

@Dannyrod mate, I’m starting a #virginblue boycott. From now on it’s #tigerairways for me!!!

Most of these tweets appear to get progressively worse for the brand and the PR for the company, so what is the companies initial response?

VirginBlue Response

So its often important to see how quickly a company responds, with Virgin they managed to send out a followup email 3 hours after the initial mistake. While this is a short term solution based on the tweets many of their Velocity members do not feel it is satisfactory for such a failure.

The initial members that flooded the website causing it to crash and also the customer service phone calls did not see this update unless they visited the website some time after they received the initial email.

The delay in sending out a followup email of up to 3 hours does not show a full understanding of the greater issue and the importance of a quick response. It would have not been a massive issue for VirginBlue to offer to honor the deal or at least offer a discount off a future VirginBlue flights.

The official tweet from the VirginBlue account did not seem to go beyond a general generic response. Using social media platforms such as twitter allow one-to-one communication but they failed to do this….

Friday the 13th strikes! Some members have been advised of an upgrade that they are ineligible for. We regret any inconvenience caused.

Failure learnings?

So what can be learned from this situation, first point is that if you stuff up, monitor the social media traffic to see what the key issue is and what are the angry/outspoken members looking for as a possible resolution. In this case there appeared to be a consistent feeling that honoring the deal would have resolved the situation and been a great PR exercise for the Velocity program.

Did the initial offer match the velocity program? Yes, to make the issue more of a sore spot, read the footer below included on the email sent to members. So it is a fair point that people could have believed that the email was realistic, believable and likely to be true….

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While many companies seem to be understanding how social media works and they are slowly getting better at tracking consumer sentiment and complaints they still seem to fail at responding. Following someone’s bad advice as to how to best respond to the increasing negative feelings within social media and mainstream media, AT&T produced a “Im a PC” style video.

The canned response from AT&T is a PR polished video combining flashy graphics, friendly images and some random guy named Seth the blogger talking about how everything is not really that bad as supported by the random graphs shown in the background. The video also highlights that AT&T is to be credited for enabling the smartphone revolution over the past few years with no supportive facts or recognition of the other network providers.

The first point which Seth the blogger helps explain is that the issues around their current network issues are in fact based on you and 300% the growth in wireless usage each year. Considering falling revenue from other segments of the market would the best way to explain your failing network to provide quality service on customers using it? Is it better than consumers are not using your network?

Each time you use data on your mobile phone plan over your allocated data rate you pay your phone company its a simple enough concept. Looking on a AT&T business rates plans this shows that excess data usage is charged at $0.0048/kb or $5.12/mb which makes for a very profitable business, not something to complain about.

The process where AT&T begin to try and repair their reputation involves first explaining the complexities behind the issue of bandwidth and how more complex it is to deal with MMS. This is another area where they fail down as typically the early adopters who are also the ones making the most complaints have a good grasp around the technology and don’t need a “Dummies guide to mobiles” video. If you are trying to reach your audience using social media you need to tailor your message to your audience, and this is another area where AT&T fail.

The point about this ground breaking technology is that MMS is not a new feature on mobile phones and has been available on GSM/GPRS since MMS was first introduced by Telenor of Norway in March 2002. This was followed by Optus introduced MMS into Australia in July 2002, and mm02 launch in europe in October 2002, so why the big issue for a large telecommunication company like AT&T?

As Gizmodo points out the failure of the MMS is likely due to AT&T Opt-Out codes automatically enabled on all their subscribers accounts, so if this is in fact an internal issue why build a smoke screen around the issue that they need to do more?

So the points to learn from this social media failure is if your are responding to your complaints

match your message to your audience

don’t include useless images/graphics

support your statements with facts

don’t treat your audience as idiots

use high profile executives not characters such as “Seth the blogger”

don’t spend more money on the video than your customer service

update your website to include new product information you refer to “MMS”

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CUPERTINO, California—August 3, 2009—Apple today announced that Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, is resigning from Apple’s Board of Directors, a position he has held since August 2006.

“Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple, investing his valuable time, talent, passion and wisdom to help make Apple successful,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome OS, Eric’s effectiveness as an Apple Board member will be significantly diminished, since he will have to recuse himself from even larger portions of our meetings due to potential conflicts of interest. Therefore, we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.”

While Google has been careful not to step on too many of Apple’s toes as they expanded their business the launch of Android set the wheels in motion for Eric Schmidt step down. The recent release of Chrome OS has not helped worries within Apple users that Google will turn into the next Microsoft.

The final nail in the coffin appears to be the FTC letters to AT&T, Apple & Google to please explain why Google Voice App was denied from the Apple App Store. Many within the industry thought that with the increasing number of Apple & Google products competitng when Eric Schmidt would have to leave the board. So maybe the idea of more Google products such as a Google Phone might be closer now that they dont have to play friendly with Apple?

What it does look like that this will mean a 3way fight between MSN/Yahoo VS Apple VS Google to win over the consumers. But will many of the default settings on the iPhone such as having Google Search or Google Maps change because of this move? But do Apple set the default search to Bing or stay with Google to keep their users happy?

What is most interesting is that it appears that Apple is the first to announce the move in a PR release on their website, but Google has not made any public announcement at the time this article was written within the Google Press Center.

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It seems that the Nike team has been working to ensure what could have been a small PR issue turns into a frontpage disaster story. Earlier in July, Nike confiscated videotapes recorded showing NBA allstar LeBron James, being dunked by amateur player Jordan Crawford.

The event took place at the LeBron James Skills Academy in Akron, OH where 2 accredited journalists filmed Jordan Crawford scoring an easy basket while LeBron James was playing defence.

The low quality camcorder footage which does not clearly identify players did not make for any interesting news until Nike demanded the tapes on the grounds that it violated media guidelines which does not allow filming of the skills academy games.

What happened at this point was that internet phenomenon of the Streisand effect took over causing the information to be so widely publicised that it becomes an YouTube sensation. As with the 2003 request by Barbara Streisand to remove aerial photographs of her beach house made a fuss of what is a small issue, but highlighting the issue as one worthy of news coverage.

What turns this into a very bad public relations exercises for Nike is that they appeared to be more concerned with trying to sell LeBron James as the next very brand-able star. This money earner for Nike needs to always look good, so the possible humiliation or at least humbling of LeBron James may not sit well with their future revenue plans.

To ensure that this matter did not get shown by the broadcast partner CBS, Nike demanded all tapes of the event, creating instant interest in what happened. Even if this had been the most boring event ever filmed the fact that the heavy handed approach showed that maybe people were missing out on something great and the interest started.

With such interest it is only a matter of time before a video made its way to YouTube, but it did take up to 2 weeks for the crew at TMZ to get it their hands on it, you can watch it here.

Also recently the Nike guys have bowed to the millions of viewers who have already seen the video and given back the tapes, but not before they ensured they got as much bad press over the issue as possible. Judging by previous viral video events this matter will continue to hurt Nike’s image of being a supporter of up and coming talent if they dare challenge their existing cash cows…